Saturday, June 30, 2012

...The heavy mouth, the portable clay – it is here that I want to plant land,
survey, plant some stakes.
...
The first stake has to do with the various motions that are in play in
inscribing the tablet. The first motion is that of the sign itself, which is
entirely the act of a gesture. Of course, the very fact that the gesture is
immobilized in the sign signals the potential divide between the sign and the
gesture – once the trace is standardized, the gesture recedes before the tool
itself: the printing press is prefigured in Enmerkar’s act. Perhaps it is a
mark of that mechanical future that Enmerkar does not consult the gods before
creating his magic object, if we think of the gods in opposition to tools.
There are mythical hints of this in the Eastern Mediterranean myths concerning
the human rebellions against the gods. Still, Enmerkar does not act in
conscious rebellion against the goddess Inanna, his protector: he simply
responds to a particular human incapacity, a heavy jaw.
That first motion is echoed in the second motion, which is the material in
which the figure is written. The text is always inscribed on something – some
substratum, some hyperkeimenon. This is the orginal sublimated object – it
gives itself to its own substitution by existing, on that day, in the moment of
inscription, as the inscribed thing. And its movement is subordinate to the
figures that are inscribed upon it – they exist above it, so to speak. They
fly, like cherubim and seraphim, like bugs and Gods, and land. The substratum
travels, too, but dumbly, materially – its flight is to the flight of the
figures as the flight of a thrown
pebble is to the flight of a bird. However, the doubleness of its mobility is
essentially like that of the figures. As a standardized object, it is immobile
enough to bear the inscription. But as a limited object in space, it also can be sent. And it is here that it
intervenes in the social logic of writing – it is here that its sublimation is,
and always will be, imperfect. For if the written couldn’t be sent, then the
object itself would have a heavy mouth. In limit cases – of heavy blocks –
writing and the object slow down. In the imagination, this slowing down has to
do with a superhuman memory, or a monument. The block, the marble or granite of
the monument bears the fall of the figure into the imperial realm of
“eternity”, outlasting the human generations just as the tablet can circulate
outside of the community. The flight of the day is frozen into the date of the
monument.
The second stake is in the trick, or trope, the turn, the trope, the magical
transformation of object to beast, sound to sense, mark to meaning. Why is this
a trick or a trap, however? It will take civilizations of nostalgia to answer
that question, but the question seems to be posed, or coiled at least, in the
story. The transformation of sound – which can cause a mouth to get heavy –
into sense is paralleled by the transformation of the mark into meaning, but
going in this direction, we leave behind the hyperkeimenon, we forget it. In
the story, the Lord of Aratta is tricked into surrendering by taking the tablet
in his hand – it is the tablet itself that has the magical meaning. This
trick is reversed in a more common
fairy tale, that of the fatal sealed letter. A prince or troublemaker is given
a sealed message to carry to a king. The message states that the king should
murder the messanger. Here, the trick is the script, and the matter it must be
written on is the veil. Matter eclipses itself – one of its tricks.

Friday, June 29, 2012

Every kind of paper is purchased by the "waste-men." One of these
dealers said to me: "I've often in my time 'cleared out' a lawyer's
office. I've bought old briefs, and other law papers, and 'forms' that weren't
the regular forms then, and any d——d thing they had in my line. You'll excuse
me, sir, but I couldn't help thinking what a lot of misery was caused, perhaps,
by the cwts. of waste I've bought at such places. If my father hadn't got mixed
up with law he wouldn't have been ruined, and his children wouldn't have had
such a hard fight of it; so I hate law. All that happened when I was a child,
and I never understood the rights or the wrongs of it, and don't like to think
of people that's so foolish. I gave 1 1/2 d. a pound for all I bought at the
lawyers, and done pretty well with it, but very likely that's the only good
turn such paper ever did any one—unless it were the lawyers themselves."
–Henry Mayhew, Of the street buyers of waste (paper), London Labour
Men no sooner discovered the discovered the admirable art of communicating
their ideas by way of figures than it was necessary to chose the material for
defining those characters. – Encyclopedie, entry under Papeterie
From the grammatological point of view, few sentences could sum up the
logocentric ideology better than this one from Diderot’sEncyclopedie. It is a history in two
steps:in one of which the “figures”
are discovered, and in the other of which they find a substrate, a material
upon which they could assume their secondary, visible existence. In this story,
the material is already substituted –its existence is laid out under the sign
of substitution - or of supplementation, or of sublimation. The true mark, the
idea, exists before its fall into the world of paper – or papyrus, or clay
tables, or vellum.
In a Sumerian story, the invention of writing and the material for defining
the characters are put in a closer narrative proximity – one in which that
matter exists in a series of symbolically important materials that form the
basis of what Jean Jacques Glassner calls a “duel”. The ur-form of the story is
a competition between two magicians, one of whom transforms common objects into
living beings, the other one of whom transforms common objects into superior
living beings that eat the first magicians tricks – a stone becomes a snake,
for instance, while the leaf of a tree becomes an eagle that eats the snake. A
similar story of the duel of matter is told of Enmerkar, the ruler of a
powerful state, and the Lord of Aratta, a distant state that Enmerkar wishes to
gain tribute. Enmerkar sends messangers threatening Arrata. The first messenger
threatens to have the goddess Inanna drown the city. The Lord of Aratta sent
back a refusal, and a challenge: could Enmerkar send grain to the city in nets
rather than sacks? Enmerkar does so, sending grains that sprout and provide a
layer over the holes in the nets. The second time, Enmerkar sends his scepter,
and the third time a garment. The forth time Enmerkar does something completely
new, and without consulting the gods: he takes a lump of clay and he wrote upon
it. The duel, here, comes to an end with the Lord of Aratta having to take hold
of the clay tablet in order to read it. As in a children’s game, by touching
the object, the Lord of Aratta signals his submission.

But this moment is less the conclusion of a magicalduel than the first unintended result of the
letter – for Enmerkar was not originally intending to send a letter. Here’s how
the passage is translated by Fabienne Huber Vulliet:
“His speech was substantial,and its contents extensive. The messenger, whose
mouth was heavy, was not able to repeat it. Because the messenger, whose mouth
was tired,was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba patted some clay and
wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing of messages on clay
was not established. Now, under the sun and on that day, it was indeed so. The
lord of Kulaba inscribed the massage like a tablet. It was just like that.”The message and the clay, here, come together in a
narrative about tricky objects – about metamorphosis – that is enfolded in
another narrative about imperial power. From the point of view of the author of
the lord of Kulaba, the signs and the tablet are two sides of one dated event (Now,
under the sun and on that day…). There is a triangle here between the figures,
the tablet, and the time – for that day is, in a sense, signed and becomes that
day, the object of an act of deixis.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

How dumb are the economic policies our master’s have loaded
on our back? This dumb:

“…the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has downwardly
revised potential economic output for 2017 by 6.6 percent since the start of
the recession. This may seem trivial, but for a $15 trillion economy, this dip
reflects roughly $1.3 trillion in lost future income in a single year, on
top of years of cumulative forgone income (already at roughly
$3 trillion and counting). The level of potential output projected for 2017
before the recession is now expected to be reached between 2019 and
2020—representing roughly two-and-a-half years of forgone potential income.” –
Andrew Fieldhouse

That forgone potential income will not be coming out of the
pockets of the plutocrats. If in the
next four years we face another slump, the only group that will get bailed out
will be the fat cats, just as the only group bailed out in 2008-2009 were the
bankers, boiler room conmen, hedgefunders and offshore men who got the Fed’s
Instaloan cure. So we have a rough estimate, at least, of the next step down by
the American middle class. They can stare at it, or they can stare at the
glassy screen of their tv and pretend that the instruments haven’t flashed the
disaster sign. I think of this as sort
of the Dixiefication of the U.S. – every space will eventually look like S.C.,
with the rich in the stratosphere and the rest happy to get catfish.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Marx congratulated Malthus (whose work he otherwise disparaged)
for understanding that Smith’s more sophisticated division between productive and unproductive
labour was the foundation stone of The Wealth of Nations. The metaphor of the
foundation stone is important, here – Say, as Marx knew, had claimed that it
was the stone that the builders could reject – although Say did not frame it in
that biblical way. Marx, who had a great pool of references whirling in his
unconscious, probably fixed on this – he did like troping the biblical Zitat.

But why was it so essential, in Marx’s view? I think it is
because the distinction allows one to see that capitalism generates, internally,
a socially defined class structure that cannot be separated from its
economically defined activity. It is a class structure that is different in
kind from the status structures before it, even as the forms of distinction
characterizing those status structures heralded the new system, one where the
great binary, the spheres of production and circulation, allowed something that
seemed impossible in the Malthusian world: untrammeled growth. And thus the
great wheel of fortune would be broken. Like Prospero’s gear:

But if the class system of capitalism has done with the former
unproductive class, the aristocracy, and industrializes agriculture, thus
chasing away the peasant and his moeurs, the dualism of class does not
necessarily seem like a dualism. This is largely due to the fact that the
sphere of circulation in which the circulation worker moves does not form a
homogeneous opposition to production: the workers within it are not capitalists
per se.

In fact, the capitalist remove from nature and from production
is accomplished under the cover of the circulation worker, who becomes,
increasingly, the ideal character type of modernity.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.